Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Locke on Religious Crisis and Civil War: Nominalism, Skepticism, and the Essay in Context
- 2 Locke’s Inverted Quarantine: Discipline, Panopticism, and the Making of the Liberal Subject
- 3 Locke’s Labor Loosed: Discipline and the Idle
- 4 Locke the Landgrave: Inegalitarian Discipline
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
2 - Locke’s Inverted Quarantine: Discipline, Panopticism, and the Making of the Liberal Subject
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 May 2021
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Locke on Religious Crisis and Civil War: Nominalism, Skepticism, and the Essay in Context
- 2 Locke’s Inverted Quarantine: Discipline, Panopticism, and the Making of the Liberal Subject
- 3 Locke’s Labor Loosed: Discipline and the Idle
- 4 Locke the Landgrave: Inegalitarian Discipline
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
As years increase, liberty must come with them, and in a great many things he must be trusted to his own conduct, since there cannot always be a guard upon him, except what you have put into his own mind.
—John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning EducationJohn Locke's frustration with the force of habit and the sway of passion is evident (EHU 4.16, 4.19–20). It is considerably less clear, however, that Locke refashions these supposed obstacles to freedom; he seeks not to extirpate habit, but rather to reform it so that it might function as the foundation of civil society. Even those who appreciate this disciplinary Locke fail to plumb the depth of these commitments or to grasp fully their necessity for social order, a necessity transcending the education of critical citizens, though this is certainly part of Locke's design. My central claim is that the Lockean (and indeed liberal) subject is deeply disciplined and thoroughly normalized, and as a result, governed more by habitual virtues than rational reflection or autonomous calculation.
In short, I argue that Locke enlists the unparalleled efficacy of the “law of fashion” to normalize his subjects, entangling them in relations of power that entice them to internalize discipline and govern themselves; they (the elite, at least) are neither “dragooned” nor forced. Respect for the agency of the subject is an essential precondition of the effectiveness of his technique, though we must not confuse this agency with autonomy. Locke would place the child in an inverted quarantine, invisibly manipulating his desire for esteem, gently correcting his undisciplined mind and teaching him to become his own governor, to internalize the reasonable, industrious, and honest practices that ground the possibility of liberal civil society. This education is not limited to implanting the desire to reason: it constructs an “empire of habit” governing conduct. The goal is the docile, productive subject and good citizen liberal order demands.
Parental power, then, is central to Lockean politics, though not as the archetype for politics that Filmer claims. Locke depoliticizes the family by differentiating parental and political power, though the power the parent wields is every bit as critical to Locke's conception of politics as the power of a magistrate, for it is predominately the parent—not the magistrate—who constructs the tolerant, rational, docile, and industrious subjects demanded by his Second Treatise.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Empire of HabitJohn Locke, Discipline, and the Origins of Liberalism, pp. 43 - 61Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2016